By way of background, gun violence has become all too common in the United States, and really the world over, in recent years, as evidenced by the senseless and tragic shootings at public schools in Columbine, Colo. in 1999 and Newtown, Conn. in 2012, on college campuses from coast to coast, such as Virginia Tech in 2007 and Umpqua Community College in Oregon in 2015, at a Denver, Colo. movie theater in 2012, and at a South Carolina church in 2015. Gun control advocacy group EVERY TOWN FOR GUN SAFETY has identified at least ninety-four (94) school shootings alone in thirty-three (33) states since the Newtown massacre, which left 20 children and 6 teachers dead, according to an article in The Huffington Post on Jan. 18, 2016. Other sources indicate that in just the year 2015 there were at least three hundred fifty-five (355) mass shootings in the U.S. alone.
Though gun laws and gun rights is an ageless debate and legal, regulatory, and technological solutions to the problem of gun violence and gun-related crimes have been sought for decades if not centuries, recent “mass shootings” and other gun violence as highlighted above has sparked even more interest in finding ways to curb gun violence, to this point without much if any success. In general, proposals for gun laws relate to restrictions on and documenting and tracking who can purchase or has purchased firearms, magazines or to limitations or regulations on the types of firearms and ammunition that can be purchased, which actions have virtually no impact on the roughly over three hundred million firearms already in the United States. Some states, such as California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York, have enacted laws limiting magazine capacity. Ultimately, of course, in the United States any such rules, laws, and regulations and related gun and ammunition technologies are in tension with and are to be consistent with or not run afoul of the fundamental right to lawfully “keep and bear arms” under the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
In terms of technology, personalized guns or “smart guns” have been developed in recent years that include a safety feature or features that allow them to fire only when activated by an authorized user (i.e., the owner). These safety features are intended to prevent misuse, accidental shootings, gun thefts, use of the weapon against the owner, and self-harm by distinguishing between authorized users and unauthorized users in several different ways, including the use of RFID chips or other proximity tokens, fingerprint recognition, magnetic rings, or mechanical locks, though it will be appreciated that such “smart guns” can do nothing about an authorized user firing them, in any location or direction and at any person or object.
More recently, microstamping has been proposed, which entails laser etching the firing pin and breech face of a semi-automatic firearm, for example, so that when a round is fired a unique identifying mark is left on the primer by the firing pin and another is left on the cartridge case by the breech face etching. This approach to identifying a shooter by the discharged casings is rife with shortcomings. For one, the microstamping technology only links a casing to a gun, not necessarily a shooter. And even the link to a particular gun can be foiled by removing casings from a crime scene or salting the crime scene with casings from other guns or using a revolver or other weapon that does not discharge the casings. Semiautomatic weapons sold with microstamping technology can also be easily retrofitted by replacing the firing pin, slide, barrel or ejector as needed to effectively disable the microstamping feature. Or the etching can be removed using a diamond-coated file or may simply wear away after a number of rounds are fired. And, as noted above, any such technology has no bearing on the over three hundred million guns already in the United States. Fundamentally, microstamping and other such techniques at best can help link a firearm and potentially an owner or user to a crime, but have virtually no impact on actually preventing a gun-related crime in the first place—they can serve as a deterrent but can in no way actually stop a gun from being fired.
In attempting to address the ammunition itself rather than the firearms, there has been proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,881,284 a “limited-life cartridge primer” that utilizes an explosive that can be designed to become inactive in a predetermined period of time: a limited-life primer. The explosive or combustible material of the primer is an inorganic reactive multilayer (RML). The reaction products of the RML are sub-micron grains of non-corrosive inorganic compounds that would have no harmful effects on firearms or cartridge cases, with the sensitivity of an RML determined by the physical structure and the stored interfacial energy and lowering with time due to a decrease in interfacial energy resulting from interdiffusion of the elemental layers. Time-dependent interdiffusion being predictable, the functional lifetime of an RML primer may be predetermined by the initial thickness and materials selection of the reacting layers. Without regard to the efficacy of this approach or any commercial adoption thereof, it will be appreciated that such RML layer interdiffusion or other such chemical degradation essentially would only render ammunition inactive over time or in a time-dependent manner, not being capable of selectively disabling ammunition at any particular, desired time or doing so in a location-dependent manner.
Thus, there still exists a need for a technology that has heretofore been unavailable that can directly impact and selectively control or disable the use or operation of firearms based on their location, thereby preventing essentially unlawful uses while allowing lawful uses such as self defense, hunting, and recreation. Such a solution would provide a substantial safety benefit and prevention of certain mass shootings and other gun violence and would preferably achieve this result without any changes to or retrofitting of existing firearms and ammunition configurations, thereby being effective in both new and existing firearms, thus providing a practical solution for the roughly three hundred million guns already in the United States.
Aspects of the present invention fulfill these needs and provide further related advantages as described in the following summary.